Vollenhovia penetrans ( Smith, 1857 )

Vollenhovia penetrans ( Smith, 1857) View in CoL

Material examined. Queen, Mandai Road, 18 Nov 2016, G.W. Yong leg., ZRC _ ENT00027986 View Materials .

Material not physically examined. Unknown.

Literature. None. New record.

Localities. Mandai Road

Habitat/Ecology. A single queen of this species was collected from native-dominated old/mature secondary forest in Singapore.

Remarks. This species was first described as ‘ Atta penetrans ’ based on a single queen from Borneo ( Smith 1857). At the time of writing, we verified the identity of ZRC material with the original description and holotype images available online.

We also examined a few queen specimens associated with workers from Borneo and the Malay Peninsula. A single isolated queen from Sulawesi well agreed with these queens. Furthermore, queen-associated workers mentioned above well agreed with separate samples of workers (without queens)

from Borneo, which had in turn been directly compared with type specimens of V. fridae at the MHNG by one of us (SKY). All these strongly imply the conspecifity of the four forms: brevicornis , fridae , penetrans , pertinax (see Remarks for V. brevicornis ).

If that is the case, the oldest name should be V. penetrans , with all the others being its junior synonyms.

However , we are reluctant to synonymize these three forms under V. penetrans , as it remains possible that some of these constitute a cryptic species complex. For example, we detected a slight difference among the queens examined, namely the space between frontal carinae (posterior portion of clypeus) – this area is densely striate-reticulate in the Singapore queen and the type specimen image, but smooth in the queens from Borneo, the Malay Peninsula and Sulawesi. We believe that all these forms are closely related, but final species statuses should be decided with assessment of more information – including male genitalia and DNA – amassed in future .